Books by Charles Russell
Spirit Bear: Encounters with the White Bear of the Western Rainforest
Princess Royal Island, an uninhabited spot of land off the coast of British Columbia, is the home of the rare Kermode bear, a variety of grizzly bear. Also called the white, ghost, or spirit bear, it has long been the subject of myth, curiosity, and fascination to humans. Until recently, these animals had never been exposed to civilization.
Now reissued with a new introduction by the author, Spirit Bear is the story of Charles Russell's quest to forge a unique relationship of mutual trust with the rare spirit bear of Princess Royal Island. Russell was on the island to help Jeff and Sue Turner with their film, Island of the Ghost Bear. During the course of the shoot, he became intrigued with, and eventually befriended the shy young Spirit Bear who was the subject of the film.
Russell has spent many years studying bears in their natural habitat. In this book he describes his early encounters, shared with his father, well-known writer Andy Russell, with bears in the Rockies and Alaska, and his encounters with grizzlies in British Columbia's Khutzeymateen Valley.
This wonderful book, which is illustrated with 100 breathtaking color photographs, is part of an ongoing effort by conservationists to save Princess Royal Island as a sanctuary for the Kermode bear.
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C. M. Russell 2006 Engagement Calendar
One of the best-known painters of the West, Charles Russell even has a museum in his honor. This calendar features twelve pieces of art that depict the Wild West as most of us can only imagine. The nostalgic images by "the cowboy that loved to draw" have made this a modern classic.
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The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
by Charles Russell, Owen Wister, Frederic Remington
Dime novels had featured some rather scrawny horse-bound tenders of cattle, but not until 1902 did the cowboy become a fully realized article of American culture. That year Owen Wister, a native of Philadelphia, published the novel that established the conventions of the western. An immediate best seller, it has never faded from public consciousness. Suddenly there was the natural aristocrat, the Virginian, who faced down the archetypal villain. Trampas, flinging at him the unforgettable words "When you call me that, smile!" There was the eastern schoolteacher, Molly, far from being a wilted flower. They moved in the raw, bracing atmosphere that generations of readers and moviegoers would come to expect from westerns. To read The Virginian, again or for the first time, is to enter a cultural phenomenon.
This Bison Book makes available once more the memorable 1929 edition that brought together the art of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. It adds an introduction by one of today's most brilliant creators of rugged individualists, Thomas McGuane. The author of Nobody's Angel (1982) and Keep the Change (1989), McGuane shows how The Virginian "bears all the advantages and disadvantages of being a precursor."
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Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art
by Charles Russell, Carol Crown
Sacred and Profane: Voice and Vision in Southern Self-Taught Art presents historical and cultural analyses of southern self-taught art that focus on the cultural contexts of the art's creation, as well as on the lives and works of representative artists, while also addressing their reception by the mainstream art world.
Reflecting the South's complex cultural, religious, racial, and political admixture, the artists draw from, and frequently combine, diverse visual sources and creative traditions. Sacred and Profane focuses, in particular, on southern artists' efforts to find personally fulfilling forms of aesthetic expression that give vision and voice to the simultaneous demands of the sacred and the profane dimensions of existence.
Because in the South religion is woven through the very fabric of society, interlacing social beliefs, customs, practices, and behaviors, vernacular artists often testify to intensely held religious beliefs through their art. Essays by Charles Reagan Wilson and Frédéric Allemel discuss the range of religious artistic creations, while studies of Howard Finster, Myrtice West, Anderson Johnson, and Eddie Martin (St. EOM) illuminate the intensely personal religious experience of particular artists. The works of some artists, such as Nellie Mae Rowe and Clementine Hunter, address both the sacred and the profane dimensions of their lives, while the art of Bill Traylor, George Andrews, and Thornton Dial focuses more on the individual artist's social observations and personal responses to their times and the history of the South.
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Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art
With essays by Russell Bowman, Roger Cardinal, Arthur C. Danto, Ellen Dissanayake, Michael Owen Jones, Randall Morris, Sharon Patton, Charles Russell, Maude Southwell Wahlman, and Alison Weld
The creators of self-taught art have no academic artistic training and little connection to the established traditions of Western art history. Yet their works have undeniable aesthetic impact.
What are the origins of the artists' aesthetic choices and strategies? How is artistic production shaped by the artist and the culture? By what standards are the works to be analyzed and judged? Answering such questions that the mainstream often asks, this collection of essays brings a clearer understanding of the purpose and the achievement of "outsider art."
It is the first book to give self-taught art the same degree of scholarly attention and critical thinking that mainstream art traditionally receives. It features the views of some of the most prominent critics of vernacular art and explores a wide range of subjects from a variety of critical approaches dealing with self-taught art in all its forms.
The ten critics explore the sources and contexts of creation, focus on the personal roots of creativity, and challenge the reductivist views that for too long have dominated discussions of self-taught art, particularly the African American vernacular.
Thirty-two full-color plates and seventy-two black-and-white photographs illuminate these essays with the work of America's most acclaimed self-taught artists--William Edmondson, Thornton Dial, Howard Finster, James "Son" Thomas, Mose Tolliver, Nellie Mae Rowe, Minnie Evans, Joseph Yoakum, Bill Traylor, and other such creators of art that challenges mainstream aesthetics.
Charles Russell, an associate professor of English at Rutgers University, is the associate director of the Rutgers Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience. His books include Poets, Prophets, and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism and The Avant-Garde Today: An International Anthology.
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